Bill,
> Honestly, this seems like an inordinate amount of
> babysitting for a production application. I'm not
> sure if the client will be willing to accept it.

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Well, then, tell them not to delete 75% of the rows in a table at once. I
imagine that operation brought processing to a halt, too.
If the client isn't willing to accept the consequences of their own bad data
management, I'm not really sure what you expect us to do about it.
> Admittedly my knowledge of the inner workings of an
> RDBMS is limited, but could somebody explain to me why
> this would be so? If you delete a bunch of rows why
> doesn't the index get updated at the same time?
It does get updated. What doesn't happen is the space getting reclaimed. In
a *normal* data situation, the dead nodes are recycled for new rows. But
doing a massive delete operation upsets that, and generally needs to be
followed by a REINDEX.
> Is
> this a common issue among all RDBMSs or is it
> something that is PostgreSQL specific?
Speaking from experience, this sort of thing affects MSSQL as well, although
the maintenance routines are different.
--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco
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